History of Palestine

Thank you for helping us expand this topic!
Simply begin typing or use the editing tools above to add to this article.
Once you are finished and click submit, your modifications will be sent to our editors for review.

Ads by Google

This topic is discussed in the following articles:

major treatment

Battle of the Yarmūk River

The Yarmūk was the site of the Battle of the Yarmūk River, one of the decisive battles in the history of Palestine. The Arabs, who under Khālid ibn al-Walīd had conquered Damascus in ad 635, were forced to leave the city when they were threatened by a large Byzantine army under Theodorus Trithurius. Khālid concentrated his forces south of the Yarmūk River,...

covenants

...treaties in the ancient world comes from Hittite sources, which were contemporary with the events that preceded and led up to the formation of the ancient Israelite federation of tribes in Palestine. The treaty form in written texts was highly developed and flexible but usually exhibited the following structure: preamble, historical prologue, stipulations, provisions for deposit and...

Crusades

A successful surprise attack on the Egyptian relief army ensured the Crusaders’ occupation of Palestine. Having fulfilled their vows of pilgrimage, most of the Crusaders departed for home, leaving the problem of governing the conquered territories to the few who remained. Initially, there was disagreement concerning the nature of the government to be established, and some held that the holy...

...vacant bishoprics and abbacies from Clement III (1187–91). Yet Frederick did not live to consolidate this effort. The defeat of the Crusader army at Ḥaṭṭīn in the Holy Land in July 1187 and the subsequent fall of Jerusalem sent a great shock through the West and inspired the Third Crusade. Frederick took the cross; the kings of England and France followed...

Egypt

...from Asia is known in the late 12th dynasty and became more widespread in the 13th. From the late 18th century bc the northeastern Nile River delta was settled by successive waves of peoples from Palestine, who retained their own material culture. Starting with the Instruction for Merikare, Egyptian texts warn against the dangers of infiltration of this sort, and its occurrence...

...frequent and violent. The pressure prevented any Egyptian government from settling its two main external problems: the need to revise the treaty with Britain, and the wish to back the Arabs in Palestine. Negotiations with Britain, undertaken by al-Nuqrāshī and (after February 1946) by his successor, Ṣidqī, broke down over the British refusal to rule out eventual...

Gaza Strip

After rule by the Ottoman Empire ended there in World War I (1914–18), the Gaza area became part of the League of Nations mandate of Palestine under British rule. Before this mandate ended, the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) in November 1947 accepted a plan for the Arab-Jewish partition of Palestine under which the town of Gaza and an area of surrounding territory were to be...

Ḥamās

militant Palestinian Islamic movement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the creation of an Islamic state in Palestine. Founded in 1987, Ḥamās opposed the 1993 peace accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Israel

...1986–90. One conflict, however, always remained volatile—and perhaps even more so for the retreat of the superpowers and their stabilizing influence: the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Throughout his years as U.S. secretary of state, George Schultz had tried to promote the peace process in the Middle East by brokering direct negotiations between Israel and the...

The Jewish population is diverse. Jews from eastern and western Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, North America, and Latin America have been immigrating to this area since the late 19th century. Differing in ethnic origin and culture, they brought with them languages and customs from a variety of countries. The Jewish community today includes survivors of the Holocaust,...

Cold War

The Zionist movement of the late 19th century had led by 1917 to the Balfour Declaration, by which Britain promised an eventual homeland for Jews in Palestine. When that former Ottoman province became a British mandate under the League of Nations in 1922, it contained about 700,000 people, of whom only 58,000 were Jews. By the end of the 1920s, however, the Jewish community had tripled, and,...

...in rallying pan-Arab unity around resistance to Israel’s plans to divert the waters of the Jordan. Also with both eyes on Israel, the conference restored an Arab High Command and elevated the Palestinian refugees (scattered among several Arab states since 1948) to a status approaching sovereignty, with their own army and headquarters in the Gaza Strip. Syria likewise sponsored a terrorist...

Haganah

(Hebrew: “Defense”), Zionist military organization representing the majority of the Jews in Palestine from 1920 to 1948. Organized to combat the revolts of Palestinian Arabs against the Jewish settlement of Palestine, it early came under the influence of the Histadrut (“General Federation of Labour”). Although it was outlawed by the British Mandatory authorities and was...

Irgun

Jewish right-wing underground movement in Palestine, founded in 1931. At first supported by many nonsocialist Zionist parties, in opposition to the Haganah, it became in 1936 an instrument of the Revisionist Party, an extreme nationalist group that had seceded from the World Zionist Organization and whose policies called for the use of force, if necessary, to establish a Jewish state on both...

Israel Labour Party

...and nationalist parties. The decision caused deep divisions within the party; many members objected that alliance would undermine Labour’s position of support for peace negotiations with the Palestinians. In January 2011 Barak and four Labour members of the Knesset split away from Labour, forming a new party that remained in the ruling coalition. The remaining Labour members of the...

Likud

...government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin) and the Palestine Liberation Organization; although Likud supported a peace with guarantees of security, it opposed ceding major portions of land to Palestinian control and dismantling Israeli settlements in the territories that Israel had conquered in 1967. However, in subsequent years the party grew increasingly divided over its policies...

Lod

In modern times, Lod was part of the territory allocated to the potential Arab state in Palestine according to the United Nations partition resolution of Nov. 29, 1947. When the resolution was rejected by the Arab states, Lod was occupied by the invading Arab Legion of Jordan. The Israel Defense Forces attacked and captured the city on July 12, 1948; since then it has been part of Israel and...

peace process

Thanks to Bush’s leadership, the conference that opened in Madrid on October 30, 1991, spawned three diplomatic tracks: Israeli–Palestinian discussions on an interim settlement; bilateral talks between Israel, on the one hand, and Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, on the other; and multilateral conferences designed to support the first two tracks. Syria’s President Assad signalled a new...

Shas

...and education. It also has opposed efforts to further secularize Israel, particularly proposals to introduce civil marriage. Shas has equivocated on the peace accords signed between Israel and the Palestinians in the 1990s; with the exception of East Jerusalem, Shas has steadfastly opposed the building of Israeli settlements in areas conquered by Israel in 1967, and, though it supports...

Jewish Palestine in Jesus’ day

Palestine in Jesus’ day was part of the Roman Empire, which controlled its various territories in a number of ways. In the East (eastern Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt), territories were governed either by kings who were “friends and allies” of Rome (often called “client” kings or, more disparagingly, “puppet” kings) or by governors supported by a...

...accord in 1993 but nonetheless stated his willingness to support the Palestinian people. He was concerned over issues relating to Jordan’s economic links with the West Bank and the future status of Palestinians in Jordan. About a year later, Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty in which Ḥussein was recognized as the custodian of the Muslim holy sites in East Jerusalem.

Mesopotamia

...tried to push forward into Egypt but was forced to pull back after a bloody, undecided battle and to regroup his army in Babylonia. After smaller incursions against the Arabs of Syria, he attacked Palestine at the end of 598. King Jehoiakim of Judah had rebelled, counting on help from Egypt. According to the chronicle, Jerusalem was taken on March 16, 597. Jehoiakim had died during the siege,...

Near Eastern civilization

...surface to ensure some kind of crop under normal conditions. It is therefore not surprising that there is evidence of simple agriculture as far back as the 8th or 9th millennium bc, especially in Palestine, where more excavating has been done in early sites than in any other country of the Middle East. Many bone sickle handles and flint sickle edges dating from between c. 9000 and 7000...

Ottoman Empire and Turkey

...sphere of influence in Mesopotamia extended as far north as Baghdad, and Britain was given control of Haifa and ʿAkko and of territory linking the Mesopotamian and Haifa-ʿAkko spheres. Palestine was to be placed under an international regime. In compensation, the Russian gains were extended (April–May 1916) to include the Ottoman provinces of Trabzon, Erzurum, Van, and Bitlis...

Palestine Liberation Organization

umbrella political organization claiming to represent the world’s Palestinians—those Arabs, and their descendants, who lived in mandated Palestine before the creation there of the State of Israel in 1948. It was formed in 1964 to centralize the leadership of various Palestinian groups that previously had operated as clandestine resistance movements. It came into prominence only after the...

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), organized in 1964 to represent some 2,000,000 refugees from the Palestine mandate who were scattered around the Arab world and from 1968 led by Yāsir ʿArafāt, was also divided between old families of notables, whose authority dated back to Ottoman times, and young middle-class or fedayeen factions anxious to exert pressure on Israel...

Partition of Palestine

Peel Commission

Discontent in Palestine intensified after 1920, when the Conference of San Remo awarded the British government a mandate to control Palestine. With its formal approval by the League of Nations in 1922, this mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which provided for both the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine and the preservation of the civil and religious (but...

Philistines

one of a people of Aegean origin who settled on the southern coast of Palestine in the 12th century bc, about the time of the arrival of the Israelites. According to biblical tradition (Deuteronomy 2:23; Jeremiah 47:4), the Philistines came from Caphtor (possibly Crete). They are mentioned in Egyptian records as prst, one of the Sea Peoples that invaded Egypt in about 1190 bc after...

religion

role of

ʿAbdullāh I

...He was the only Arab ruler prepared to accept the United Nations’ partitioning of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states (1947). In the war with Israel in May 1948, his armies occupied the region of Palestine due west of the Jordan River, which came to be called the West Bank, and captured east Jerusalem, including much of the Old City. Two years later he annexed the West Bank territory into the...

Balfour and Balfour Declaration

...to rally Jewish opinion, especially in the United States, to the Allied side during World War I. The declaration, pledging British aid for Zionist efforts to establish a home for world Jewry in Palestine, gave great impetus to the establishment of the State of Israel.

(Nov. 2, 1917), statement of British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” It was made in a letter from Arthur James Balfour, the British foreign secretary, to Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild (of Tring), a leader of British Jewry. Though the precise meaning of the correspondence has been disputed, its statements were...

Begin

...after the general election of 1981. Despite his willingness to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt under the terms of the peace agreement, he remained resolutely opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In June 1982 his government mounted an invasion of Lebanon in an effort to oust the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from its bases there....

Ben-Gurion

...to their original homeland of Israel. Zionism fascinated the young David Gruen, and he became convinced that the first step for the Jews who wanted to revive Israel as a nation was to immigrate to Palestine and settle there as farmers. In 1906 the 20-year-old Gruen arrived in Palestine and for several years worked as a farmer in the Jewish agricultural settlements in the coastal plain and in...

Bernadotte

Appointed mediator in Palestine by the UN Security Council on May 20, 1948, Bernadotte obtained the grudging acceptance by the Arab states and Israel of a UN cease-fire order, effective June 11. He soon made enemies by his proposal that Arab refugees be allowed to return to their homes in what had become the State of Israel. After a number of threats against his life, he and André-Pierre...

Caleb

in the Old Testament, one of the spies sent by Moses from Kadesh in southern Palestine to spy out the land of Canaan. Only Caleb and Joshua advised the Hebrews to proceed immediately to take the land; for his faith Caleb was rewarded with the promise that he and his descendants should possess it (Numbers 13–14). Subsequently Caleb settled in Hebron (Kiriatharba) after driving out the...

Churchill

...he substituted a reliance on the air force and the establishment of rulers congenial to British interests; for this settlement of Arab affairs he relied heavily on the advice of T.E. Lawrence. For Palestine, where he inherited conflicting pledges to Jews and Arabs, he produced in 1922 the White Paper that confirmed Palestine as a Jewish national home while recognizing continuing Arab rights....

Eban

...as a British army major, he served as an aide to the British minister of state in Cairo. In 1946 he worked with the Jewish Agency as a political information officer to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. He also served as the liaison officer with the United Nations (UN) Special Committee on Palestine in 1947 and as a member of the delegation to the General Assembly that played a critical...

Ḥusaynī

grand mufti of Jerusalem and Arab nationalist figure who played a major role in Arab resistance to Zionist political ambitions in Palestine and became a strong voice in the Arab nationalist and anti-Zionist movements.

Louis IX

...his victory over the English, Louis IX fell seriously ill with a form of malaria at Pontoise-lés-Noyon. It was then, in December 1244, that he decided to take up the cross and go to free the Holy Land, despite the lack of enthusiasm among his barons and his entourage. The situation in the Holy Land was critical. Jerusalem had fallen into Muslim hands on August 23, 1244, and the armies of...

Meïr

...attended the Milwaukee Normal School (now University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and later became a leader in the Milwaukee Labor Zionist Party. In 1921 she and her husband, Morris Myerson, emigrated to Palestine and joined the Merẖavya kibbutz. She became the kibbutz’s representative to the Histadrut (General Federation of Labour), the secretary of that organization’s Women’s Labour...

Mizraḥi

...Mizraḥi wielded a disproportionate influence in Zionism, because of both its religiohistorical weight and its hold on the masses of Orthodox Jews in eastern Europe. In post-World War I Palestine, it played an active role in the Jewish community, establishing religious schools and firmly backing the sole authority of the chief rabbinate over matters of personal status among Jews,...

Nebuchadrezzar

On expeditions in Syria and Palestine from June to December of 604, Nebuchadrezzar received the submission of local states, including Judah, and captured the city of Ashkelon. With Greek mercenaries in his armies, further campaigns to extend Babylonian control in Palestine followed in the three succeeding years. On the last occasion (601/600), Nebuchadrezzar clashed with an Egyptian army, with...

Nūr al-Dīn

...the region, who were unable to present a unified military front against the invaders. Nūr al-Dīn waged military campaigns against the Crusaders in an attempt to expel them from Syria and Palestine. His forces recaptured Edessa shortly after his accession, invaded the important military district of Antakiya in 1149, and took Damascus in 1154. Egypt was annexed by stages in...

Oliphant

British author, traveller, and mystic, a controversial figure whose quest to establish a Jewish state in Palestine—“fulfilling prophecy and bringing on the end of the world”—won wide support among both Jewish and Christian officials but was thought by some to be motivated either by commercial interests or by a desire to strengthen Britain’s position in the Near East.

Paul VI

...this fundamental question, Paul VI undertook a series of apostolic journeys that were unparalleled occasions for a pope to set foot on every continent. His first journey was a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (January 1964), highlighted by his historic meeting with the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, Athenagoras, in Jerusalem. At the end of that same year, he went to India, the first...

Philip II Augustus

Richard, who succeeded Henry as king of England, had already undertaken to go on Crusade against Saladin in the Holy Land (the Third Crusade), and Philip now did likewise. Before his departure, he made the so-called Testament of 1190 to provide for the government of his kingdom in his absence. On his way to Palestine, he met Richard in Sicily, where they promptly found themselves at variance,...

Pompey

When Pompey (106–48 bce) invaded Palestine in 63 bce, Antipater supported his campaign and began a long association with Rome, from which both he and Herod were to benefit. Six years later Herod met Mark Antony, whose lifelong friend he was to remain. Julius Caesar also favoured the family; he appointed Antipater procurator of Judaea in 47 bce and conferred on him Roman citizenship,...

Samuel

...and philosopher, one of the first Jewish members of the British cabinet (as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, 1909–10). He was perhaps most important as first British high commissioner for Palestine (1920–25), carrying out that delicate assignment with varying but considerable success.

Solomon

Palestine was destined to be an important centre because of its strategic location for trade by land and sea. It alone connects Asia and Africa by land, and, along with Egypt, it is the only area with ports on the Atlantic-Mediterranean and Red Sea–Indian Ocean waterways. Solomon is said to have fulfilled the commercial destiny of Palestine and brought it to its greatest heights. The...

Weizmann

...the early years of the war he took an important part in the negotiations that led up to the government’s Balfour Declaration (November 1917) favouring the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.

Sykes-Picot Agreement

...War I between Great Britain and France, with the assent of imperial Russia, for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The agreement led to the division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into various French- and British-administered areas. Negotiations were begun in November 1915, and the final agreement took its name from its negotiators, Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and...

United Kingdom

...from India required, at almost the same time, the termination of the mandate in Trans-Jordan, the evacuation of all of Egypt except the Suez Canal territory, and in 1948 the withdrawal from Palestine, which coincided with the proclamation of the State of Israel. It has been argued that the orderly and dignified ending of the British Empire, beginning in the 1940s and stretching into the...

United Nations Resolution 181

resolution passed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 1947 that called for the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with the city of Jerusalem as a corpus separatum (Latin: “separate entity”) to be governed by a special international regime. The resolution—which was considered by the Jewish community in Palestine...

West Bank

The approximately 2,270-square-mile (5,900-square-km) area is the centre of contending Arab and Israeli aspirations in Palestine. Within its present boundaries, it represents the portion of the former mandate retained in 1948 by the Arab forces that entered Palestine after the departure of the British. The borders and status of the area were established by the Jordanian-Israeli armistice of...

World War I

...colonial spheres of influence. In their dealings with the Arabs the British spoke of independence for the region. Then, on Nov. 2, 1917, the Balfour Declaration promised “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” albeit without prejudice to “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” Foreign Secretary Arthur...

Having assumed command in Egypt (see above The Egyptian frontiers, 1915–July 1917), Allenby transferred his headquarters from Cairo to the Palestinian front and devoted the summer of 1917 to preparing a serious offensive against the Turks. On the Turkish side, Falkenhayn, now in command at Aleppo, was at this time himself planning a drive into the Sinai Peninsula for the autumn, but the...

World War II

...exercising their right under the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930 to move troops across Iraqi territory, landed troops at Basra on April 19 and rejected Iraqi demands that these troops be sent on into Palestine before any further landings. Iraqi troops were then concentrated around the British air base at Ḥabbānīyah, west of Baghdad; and on May 2 the British commander there...

Zionism

...a necessity both for the Jews and for the rest of humanity. Among the Jews of Russia and eastern Europe, a number of groups were engaged in trying to settle emigrants in agricultural colonies in Palestine. After the Russian pogroms of 1881, Leo Pinsker had written a pamphlet, “Auto-Emanzipation,” an appeal to western European Jews to assist in the establishment of colonies in...

Jewish nationalist movement that has had as its goal the creation and support of a Jewish national state in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews (Hebrew: Eretz Yisraʾel, “the Land of Israel”). Though Zionism originated in eastern and central Europe in the latter part of the 19th century, it is in many ways a continuation of the ancient attachment of the Jews and of the...

Click anywhere inside the article to add text or insert superscripts, subscripts, and special characters.
You can also highlight a section and use the tools in this bar to modify existing content:

Add links to related Britannica articles!
You can double-click any word or highlight a word or phrase in the text below and then select an article from the search box.
Or, simply highlight a word or phrase in the article, then enter the article name or term you'd like to link to in the search box below, and select from the list of results.

Note: we do not allow links to external resources in editor.
Please click the Web sites link for this article to add citations for
external Web sites.